When "I Don't Wanna Cry" went to number one, Mariah Carey became the first artist since the Jackson Five to have her first four chart singles top the Billboard Hot 100.

"I Don't Wanna Cry" was produced and co-written by Narada Michael Walden, who had already produced number one hits for Whitney Houston, Starship and Aretha Franklin and George Michael. The producer first heard about Mariah when he received a phone call from CBS Records Group president Tommy Mottola. "I promised when I was in New York, I would sit down and meet with her," says Walden, "and I did. She was very shy, and I asked her what she liked. She said she liked George Michael, so I got an idea of where she was coming from. Then we set up a day to actually go and write."

At this point, Narada had not heard Mariah's vocals. "The first time I heard her sing was in a writing session at the Hit Factory, where we wrote some songs. After working on three or four songs, I wanted us to slow the tempo down. A big part of my raising asa kid are songs like (those recorded) by Chuck Jackson…'I Don't Want To Cry,' 'Any Day Now,' those kind of really dramatic ballads, or 'When A Man Loves A Woman' by Percy Sledge, those 'crying' kind of ballads. I kind of pulled it down from the sky and started singing this thing to her, and she got into it."

Having worked with both Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, Narada is in a unique position to compare the two singers who have been compared so often in the press. "Both are tremendous singers. Whitney comes more from being raised and singing in church – I mean, first-hand experience with her aunts and nieces, from her influence from Aretha as a little kid, from Dionne Warwick, and from her mother, the great Cissy Houston. She had all that to draw on. On Mariah's side, I know she's a great listener. She took to heart Aretha and a lot of great singers, from Gladys Knight on down.

"It's like the difference between, say, Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson, or Tommy Hearns and Sugar Ray Leonard. Both great track stars, both great boxers – and I'm honored to be able to work with both of them.

"Mariah is very astute in the studio, very picky. I don't mean to make it sound like a negative; for her, it's a positive, because she knows she wants to hear herself sound a certain way. For example, there's a lick on 'I Don't Wanna Cry' that I was really happy with, and I think at first she was, too. But after she lived with it, she wanted us to fix it. I don't even know if we fixed it two or three times, but I had to fly the tape back to her in New York. She went in the studio, fixed that lick, and added other stuff onto it. I called her back and said, 'Look, I used your new lick on that one thing because you like it, but the other stuff you're adding on, you really don't need.' Then she gave in.

"I think a lot of that is what you experience when you're making your first album. You gotta remember, Mariah was 19, 20 years old, making her first album. She really wanted it to be special."

Narada found working with Mariah very similar to his experience with George Michael. "With George Michael, I actually had to have him stop singing, because he had me erase good vocals. He wanted me to keep going, and I said no, because I knew in my heart I already had it. The same thing with Mariah – I knew I had it. She feels if she sings more, maybe she'll go beyond it. And you know what? God bless her, in some cases, she does."

"I Don't Wanna Cry" jumped onto the Hot 100 at number 50 the week of April 6, 1991, just as "Someday" fell out of the top 10. Seven weeks later, Mariah returned to the top of the chart.